Isn't the subject people who choose to dress up, pretend or cut things off or add things on to be what they are not, genderwise?

It's strange you would say that... because in message 42 on the previous page you were saying it's alright for you to express your opinion on what other people post.Here is what you said - "Well, Quija, I didn't start this thread. However, I do have opinions on what is posted by others."That's exactly what I was doing - expressing an opinion on what was posted by others.

But anyway, your preoccupation with contradicting yourself meant you spectacularly and perhaps characteristically missed the point. The subject is indeed about people who "dress up, pretend or cut things off or add things on to be what they are not", so tell me - what gender is someone with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome?

Bear in mind that despite appearing to be female they have the XY chromosome and not XX, that they will require surgery to remove the testes (cut off), and that they will require (added) hormone support to maintain well-being.

Biology, and gender, is not as simple as you (and the person I was responding to) seem to comprehend.

People who are born in those subcategories that you mention did not choose that condition anymore than someone chose cerebral palsy or a cleft lip.

For some unexplained reason you seem to think choice is involved in gender identity when clearly, if you bother to consider the complexity of the topic that is, it isn't as simple as that.

No, Walts...no Bible was used. If you have male parts, you're a male. If you have female parts, you're a female. If you have something that resembles a little of each, you might be part of .018% of the population. This is simple biology.

I don't know if your percentage of .018% of the population that genderwise has "something that resembles a little of each" is accurate and I can't be bothered checking, but isn't it interesting that such an insignificant looking percentage, representing just 18 in a thousand, amounts in (just) the US population of 330 million to almost 600,000 people.

Walts, you and I were discussing human gender in the medical, scientific, biological sense. Men are male and women are female. Its just that simple.

No it isn't. How would you, using your binary system, classify people born with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome?In case you are not familiar, people born with this syndrome do not have "something that resembles a little of each". They normally appear to be entirely female, they are overwhelmingly raised as female, and tend overwhelmingly to identify as female. That they have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is most often discovered at puberty when they fail to menstruate and it is discovered... they do not have ovaries or a uterus. Instead they have testes they carry internally. Yet in adulthood they are often archetypically super-feminine. It's pretty obvious that despite your claim that biology is simple, their biology is not.

The flaws in your opinions about physical gender being a matter of 'simple biology' are matched by your apparently uncomprehending ignorance of any other factor that might influence gender identity.

that would be the gutting of the Johnson Administration and the idea of Separation of Church and State.

Indeed, it was an amendment to the tax code proposed by Lyndon Johnson (and named after him) when he was a senator and signed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 'Internal Revenue Code of 1954'. It basically stopped charities, including churches, from 'conducting political campaign activities to intervene in elections to public office' and therefore protected the separation of church and state.It was (sensibly) kept when the Internal Revenue Code was updated in 1986 during the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan.

But now it's been got rid of. Totally destroyed. It was the worst amendment ever. It's true.

Christianity is the past but Islam is the future for Western countries.

Huh? Islam tends to be a tiny tiny miniscule minority in the west. Can you produce statistics on a single western country where Islam constitutes even a sizeable minority?Actually Secularism is the future. 'No religion' is the fastest growing group both here in Australia and in the US.

Sweden will be the first and probably within 5-10 years for that Muslim majority.

What? Sweden is 73% Protestant, though most don't regard their nominal religion as particularly significant.Where are you getting your wildly inaccurate figures?

You have to be Christian to truly be American? Many people in the U.S. say so.

About one-third of all Americans think that you have to be a Christian to truly be an American — despite the history of religious liberty that dates back to the nation’s very earliest days.

In a timely survey released Wednesday afternoon, just as the United States is debating the merits of suspending immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the Pew Research Center asked residents of numerous nations what it takes to truly belong in their countries. Americans were far more likely than residents of other countries included in the survey to say that religion was key to sharing in the national identity.

Thirty-two percent of Americans said one should be Christian to really be American, compared to just 13 percent of Australians, 15 percent of Canadians and 15 percent of Europeans who felt the same way about belonging in their homelands.

[...]Religion was the only question on which Americans were an outlier. On birth, language and customs, America fell in line with other industrialized nations.

[...]This opinion is apparently becoming much less popular with the younger generation of Americans, who are less likely to affiliate with a religion than generations before them. Among adults over 50, 44 percent told Pew that being Christian was key to being American; among those younger than 35, 18 percent said so.

In Sweden, where 73 percent of the population is Protestant but many do not consider religion important in their lives, a mere 7 percent of respondents felt that one needs to be Christian to be a real Swede. The number was similarly low in several other European countries: 8 percent in the Netherlands, 9 percent in Spain, 10 percent in France and 11 percent in Germany.

An impulsive, vindictive, vulgar, capricious, uninformed ego-driven demagogue who surrounds himself with ideological fanatics and inexperienced dimwits loyal primarily to him is in the process of creating an intolerant theocracy. What could possibly go wrong?

Much-dreaded “sharia law,” or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.Just not in the form many Americans expected.

That is, the religiously motivated laws creeping into public policymaking aren’t based on the Koran, and they aren’t coming from mythical hard-line Islamists in, say, Dearborn, Mich. They’re coming from the White House, which wants to make it easier for hard-line Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on the rest of us.

A few days after declaring his intention to impose a religious test upon refugees so that Christians would be given priority, President Trump gave a bizarre speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. In between a plug for “The Apprentice” and boasts about his disastrous calls with heads of allied states, he made some less-noticed policy news.He vowed to help blur the line between church and state by repealing the Johnson Amendment.[...]Also this week, the Nation’s Sarah Posner published a leaked draft of an executive order that would require federal agencies to look the other way when private organizations discriminate based on religious beliefs. Coincidentally, these seem to primarily be religious beliefs held by conservative Christians.The effect of the order might be to create wholesale exemptions to anti-discrimination law for people, nonprofits and closely held for-profit corporations that claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion and transgender identity. It would also curb women’s access to contraception through the Affordable Care Act. (A White House official did not dispute the draft’s authenticity.)

This is, of course, all in the name of preserving religious freedom. Except that it allows some people to practice religious freedom by denying jobs, services and potentially public accommodation to those with differing beliefs.The order, if signed, would seem to exceed the executive branch’s authority, Posner notes; moreover, given that the order’s language appears to privilege some religious beliefs over others, it may violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

[...]Trump has also chosen personnel who seem keen on muddying the distinction between church and state.For example, his embattled education secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos, has advocated that government dollars be channeled to religious schools through relatively expansive voucher programs. (During the campaign, Trump also said that public funds should follow students to the private school of their choice, explicitly including religious schools.)During her confirmation hearings, DeVos’s cryptic comments about supporting science education that encourages “critical thinking” have also been interpreted as well-established code for supporting the teaching of intelligent design, a sort of dressed-up creationism.

[...]In a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, Americans were asked what made someone “truly American.” A third of respondents overall, and 43 percent of Republicans, said you need to be Christian. That would exclude me, as well as about 30 percent of the population.

The far right has done a lot of fear-mongering about the undue influence that religious fanatics may soon exert on the body politic. Seems they better understood what they were talking about than most of us realized.

The Dark Side of the Loon. Explaining the Temptations of ObscurantismMaarten Boudry, Filip Buekens

Abstract

After contrasting obscurantism with bullshit, we explore some ways in which obscurantism is typically justified by investigating a notorious test-case: defences of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Obscurantism abuses the reader's natural sense of curiosity and interpretive charity with the promise of deep and profound insights about a designated subject matter that is often vague or elusive. When the attempt to understand what the speaker means requires excessive hermeneutic efforts, interpreters are reluctant to halt their quest for meaning. We diagnose this as a case of psychological loss aversion, in particular, the aversion to acknowledging that there was no hidden meaning after all, or that whatever meaning found was projected onto the text by the reader herself.

[...]How is it possible to be deluded by obscurantist writings? “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”, wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who was, as it happens, himself occasionally accused of obscurantism. The charge of obscurantism suggests a deliberate move on behalf of the speaker, who is accused of setting up a game of verbal smoke and mirrors to suggest depth and insight where none exists. The suspicion is, furthermore, that the obscurantist does not have anything meaningful to say and does not grasp the real intricacies of his subject matter, but nevertheless wants to keep up appearances, hoping that his reader will mistake it for profundity.

[...]We distinguish two ways in which a theorist can make his doctrine impervious to criticism. On the one hand, he may bring forward external, theory-neutral arguments as a means for deflecting criticism. On the other hand, he may draw on theory-internal arguments and rationalizations for coping with criticism. Boudry and Braeckman (2011) have designated the former “immunizing strategies” and the latter “epistemic defence mechanisms”.

Immunizing strategies consist of general and theory-independent arguments, such as radical relativism about truth (“truth is always relative to a discourse, so your arguments miss the point since you're speaking a different type of discourse”), certain forms of social constructivism (“Every discourse creates its own version of the world, so your criticism does not apply to my paradigm”), or general informal fallacies (ad hominem arguments, straw man, false dilemma, etc.). Epistemic defence mechanisms, by contrast, are derived from the theory or belief system under scrutiny, which makes them particularly interesting for explaining its seductive power and internal rationale.

Faith: belief in absence of evidence.Belief: acceptance something is true.What seperates faith from belief is: Belief can or cannot have evidence attached to it. Faith does not have evidence attached to it.

I can. Easily. Whether you comprehend that I have is a separate issue though...

Atheism, and indeed theism, are self reported descriptions of internal mind states. Likewise, a clairvoyant who reports they can read minds. We need no more 'proof' they have the internal mind state than their report.

You are using the wrong terminology too - if you want 'proof' of things you should take up mathematics. Almost everything else is necessarily provisional.

I can easily demonstrate that atheists (people who self report lacking a belief in gods) exist, in large numbers. In exactly the same way you could easily demonstrate that theists (people who self report a belief in gods) exist, in large numbers.

Just reference any global poll, or national census, that contains a religion question.

However, the content of the reported mind state can be examined, and evidence requested (if a positive claim is made) to support its validity.

The real issue, taking clairvoyants as an example since they make a positive claim (they allege they can read minds) is the question of whether they can demonstrate there is sufficient warrant (reason, evidence) to justify belief in that claim. Likewise, since it's theists who make the positive claim (they allege there is a god, or gods, in whom they believe) the question is whether they can demonstrate there is sufficient warrant (reason, evidence) to hold that belief.

If you seriously want to engage in a worthwhile discussion as opposed to just being a wanker, and I guess your preference will be revealed shortly, you could start by addressing the actual content of this post - as I addressed yours.

You invent a (multi-dimensional! woooo!) "supernatural concept" out of thin air into which you casually insert a "higher consciousness" which you endow with qualities.

If you believe yourself to be a conscious being with qualities (though not necessarily supernatural) in a 3-D world, then there is no way that you can say there aren't any such other beings in different dimensions...

Certainly, which is why I haven't said that.

I'm saying there is no way you can say there are such beings.

Actually there's no way you can even say there are other dimensions, let alone other dimensions containing any 'higher consciousness' that can be endowed with whimsical made-up qualities. Which is why I keep saying, perfectly accurately, You don't know any of this, because there is no actual knowledge.

That we have no actual knowledge is an accurate summary. You are just pretending to know things you don't know.

The lame quip ^ of a person whose head has been stuck deep in the sand

Not at all. It's accurate. Unless you are saying you do know? Is that what you are saying? Do tell.

Just kidding! The fact is you don't know if there are other dimensions. You certainly don't know, even if there are, whether they are populated or what they might be populated with.

You are pretending to know things you don't actually know.

The existence of other dimensions is by no means certain, it is merely a hypothesis - one amongst a few. Yet that it simply isn't 'precluded' is sufficient for you to populate it with a "higher consciousness" to which anyone, apparently, can ascribe whatever qualities they like.

...we can use the euphemism of "alternate consciousness".....but any such being would have to have some form of consciousness...regardless of qualities one wishes to endow upon it.

Seriously? You don't even know whether other dimensions exist, you (obviously) can't possibly know whether or not (if they exist) they are populated, but you confidently assert your imaginary being would "have to have some form of consciousness".

As I said... your posts read exactly like a defence of personal delusion.

Step 1. Imagine an alternate dimension.Step 2. Insert consciousness into it.Step 3. Endow consciousness with desired qualities.Step 4. Ignore people who point out it the lack of evidential support.Step 5. Castigate people who doubt your imaginary friend exists.

Not at all. That we have no actual knowledge is an accurate summary. You are just pretending to know things you don't know. You invent a (multi-dimensional! woooo!) "supernatural concept" out of thin air into which you casually insert a "higher consciousness" which you endow with qualities.It's a textbook 'God of the gaps' argument. It has no substance.

There may, or may not, be other other dimensions but think about what that means. There is no crossover.

Not necessarilyyou could certainly make 2-D being experience something beyond his dimensions.If you were to drop a heavy object (from your 3-D world onto a 2-d world); what would a 2-D man see?he would see something suddenly appear outta nowhere, and he would be left speechless & bereft of any explanation, of how it got there nor could he acquire the KNOWLEDGE to figure it out!The same principle would apply from a 4-D world.. to a 3-d world

You seem now to be pretending, or assuming the (assumed) denizons of (assumed) other dimensions might have agency here in this dimension via some "principle" you claim exists.You call this reasoning?

Yet based on these musings you mysteriously "acknowledge" a "supernatural concept" into which you insert, for no good reason, a "higher consciousness" which you endow with qualities.

Are you NOT a form of consciousness in a 3-D world?If the answer is YES (assuming you are not heavily inebriated); then what would preclude the presence of another consciousness in higher dimensional realms. If so, then the question of "what qualities" to endow upon it (or not endow upon it) is strictly up to each individual.

The existence of other dimensions is by no means certain, it is merely a hypothesis - one amongst a few. Yet that it simply isn't 'precluded' is sufficient for you to populate it with a "higher consciousness" to which anyone, apparently, can ascribe whatever qualities they like.

Turn your musings around. The existence of other dimensions isn't precluded, but neither is it known whether they exist. The fact is -

Super-............above, beyond what is on parNatural--.......that in which one thrives or exists

Supernatural=beyond which one exists

The problem arises when dim & narrow minded pple like you see life only as being 3-D in a 3-D world just by using 3-D tools at our (natural) disposal; thus it becomes easy to make observations & deductions. But it would be impossible for us to make the same observations and deductions for a 4-D, (or 5-D, or 6-D, etc) world. The same logic we employ now would not even apply!

Ask a "figurative" 2-D being to measure the lenght of a closed circle it lives in, and the ANSWER is "infinity"Ask the same question to a 3-D being and the answer would be C=Pi x DNow ask a 3-D being to measure the Lenght of Space-Time...the answer is again "infinity".Thus, the notion of infinity was concocted just to give us a "way out" of a dead-end imposed upon us by the finite world we reside in, but in actuality it does not exist, outside our construct.

The point is, what we are able to experience is dependant upon what dimensions we are enclosed in. We cannot travel to a 4th, 5th, or nth dimension to get the "proof" that you insist on having...and come back alive with it. It is Fkn inanely stupid to even ask for it!... Multi-dimensional models are not superstition or Sc-Fi, they fit: String Theory (or concept); the Brane concept. & more. In short, its like a tree with branches (as fractals in nature). Many branches but 1 manifold! The onion model is another good example, though simplistic!

Now if you have at least 1/1oth of your brain working, you should be able to grasp that acknowledging the supernatural concept, is not about believing in a Mythical God, with a long beard who sits on a throne....its about understanding that the only boundaries are the ones that encase us, and not because there is a "non Plus ultra" when we die!

Which sky-father, creator, spirit (or "religion") one wants to believe is strictly of their own choice....but the point is (in their imperfect way), to acknowledge the existence or the presence of some higher consciousness in dimension(s).... beyond our own!

You are using pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo to disguise that this is just a god of the gaps argument.

You don't know any of this, because there is no actual knowledge. There may, or may not, be other other dimensions but think about what that means. There is no crossover.

Yet based on these musings you mysteriously "acknowledge" a "supernatural concept" into which you insert, for no good reason, a "higher consciousness" which you endow with qualities.

Using the same standard of proof people who claim they're "atheists" require to prove the existence of God, they can't prove "atheists" exist.

On the contrary, it's easy.

It just shows how confused people who claim they proved there is no God are.

Who is claiming to have "proved there is no God"? The burden of proof is on the deluded fools who claim there are one or more god things.Though 'proof' isn't really necessary. Just a shred of unequivocal evidence will do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_deicideJustification of prejudice against Jews for the death of Jesus has been attributed to Matthew 27:24-25, "When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 'I am innocent of this man’s blood,' he said. 'It is your responsibility!' All the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!' "

In LiturgyThe Holy Friday liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Catholics uses the expression "impious and transgressing people", but the strongest expressions are in the Holy Thursday liturgy, which includes the same chant, after the eleventh Gospel reading, but also speaks of "the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews", and, referring to "the assembly of the Jews", prays: "But give them, Lord, their reward, because they devised vain things against Thee."

A liturgy with a similar pattern, historically using the term "perfidious Jews," can be found in the Improperia * of the Roman Catholic Church.

As a part of Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issued the declaration Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time"), which in part repudiated the traditional belief in the collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion. Nostra Aetate stated that, even though some Jewish authorities and those who followed them called for Jesus' death, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of all those Jews present at that time, nor can the Jews in our time be held as guilty.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImproperiaThe Improperia are a series of antiphons and responses, expressing the remonstrance of Jesus Christ with His people. They are also known as the "Reproaches". In the Catholic liturgy they are sung as part of the observance of the Passion, usually on the afternoon of Good Friday.

The revisers of the Anglican Prayer Book have sought to downplay the historical anti-Semitism associated with the Reproaches.

Note that it was only in 1962-1965 the Catholic church 'officially' repudiated it's position that all Jews, then and now, are lawless killers. But they couldn't quite let go of it completely, all they did was concede that maybe not all the Jews living then were lawless killers, and maybe not all the Jews living now are as culpable.To illustrate they hadn't quite let go of that long held belief, it reappeared again in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_prayer_for_the_JewsThe universal permission given to priests by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 to celebrate the so-called "Tridentine" liturgy resulted in complaints from Jewish groups and some leaders in the Roman Catholic Church over what they perceived as being a return to a supersessionist theology.

The new prayer reads as follows:

Let us also pray for the Jews: That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men. (Let us pray. Kneel. Rise.) Almighty and eternal God, who want that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth, propitiously grant that even as the fullness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

The new formulation continued to be met with reservations by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. Though they considered the removal of "blindness" and "immersion in darkness" with respect to the Jews an improvement over the original Tridentine language, no reason was offered as to why the Good Friday prayer from the Reformed Rite of Paul VI was not simply used instead.

And to step back in time, uniting this post with my previous one about the things Hitler said about religion, and his attitude toward Jews...Here's a reference to the actual historically known speech and actions of the wartime Pope (allegedly the infallible earthly representative of God) that show he probably thought at least parts of Mein Kampf made sense.

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/mine/timeline.htm

In 1942 Great Britain, the Polish Government-in-exile, Brazil, the United States, and Uruguay press Pope Pius XII to condemn the Nazi treatment of Jews. The Pope responds to this international appeal with his Christmas radio address, but does not specifically mention the Jews

In 1945, addressing the College of Cardinals after the end of the European war, Pope Pius XII speaks of the hundreds of priests and religious who died in Nazi concentration camps, but makes no mention of the Jews

So who was this Pope Pius XII guy? Why wouldn't God's right hand man here on earth, the guardian of morality and all things good lend his support to Britain and the Allies opposing the forces of nastiness and horror?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_antisemitismPope Pius XIIBefore becoming Pope, Cardinal Pacelli presided as Papal Legate over the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest on 25–30 May 1938. At this time antisemitic laws were in the process of being formulated in Hungary. Pacelli made reference to the Jews "whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today".

In the summer of 1942, Pius explained to his college of Cardinals the reasons for the great gulf that existed between Jews and Christians at the theological level: "Jerusalem has responded to His call and to His grace with the same rigid blindness and stubborn ingratitude that has led it along the path of guilt to the murder of God."

mmm... Was Hitler a fantasist with supernatural leanings? Or was he a critical thinker who tended through rational analysis toward atheism? Well, we know he had 'skills' in certain areas, but we also know he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. So take a guess...

From Mein Kampf, the manifesto/book he himself wrote - http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/toc.htm

The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following: (a) Lowering of the level of the higher race; (b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the ......beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.

To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.

[snip]

Concerning the moral value of Jewish religious instruction, there are today... exhaustive studies which make this kind of religion (Judaism) seem positively monstrous according to Aryan conceptions. His life (the Jew) is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter (Christ) made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity...In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties.http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v1c11.htm

The usual response to this ^^^ type of reference tends to be an attempt to insert the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy into the discussion, while ignoring the fact that Hitler explicitly links atheism, Jewish political parties, and social corruption.

Elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler says -

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v1c2.htm

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v1c8.htm

I dunno about you all, but this ^^^ doesn't sound to me like the kind of thing an atheist would say? It sounds more like the kind of thing someone might say if they thought they were on a mission from god.

But the fact is, Adolf wasn't exactly a good Catholic, but he knew his goals and the goals of the established (Catholic) church were not entirely incompatible. Established Catholicism agreed, hence the early non-interference treaties - with both local Catholic authorities and the Vatican.Symbols are important, and it's a fact Hitler used religious mottos - the belt buckles used by all Wehrmacht soldiers (God With Us) are a well known example.

I find discussions of Hitler's religious views tedious partly because, on the one hand, it's obvious he was an ideologue in competition with the church, and on the other hand because he, as Mr. Fascism, distrusted all intellectuals and critical thinkers - including atheists.

The only worthwhile point about Hitlers relationship to the church is the fact that the Catholic church (apart from a few individuals - who got silenced) did not condemn Hitler, or his activities. Actually he got a lot of support from the pulpit, not just local priests but from the Bishops as well - I can, of course, produce citations to demonstrate that if needed. The Vatican was also active in the 'underground railway' that smuggled so many ex-Nazi's to South America after the war. It's not a coincidence that South America was the preferred destination, it is a Catholic stronghold. I can produce citations to demonstrate that too if needed, but anyone can easily find these things out for themselves and I'm trying to limit the length of the post.

This fact pretty comprehensively demolishes the often heard claim that only god-given holy sacred religion is a reliable source of morality, or even the idea that the church/religion is a worthwhile source of knowledge as to what is good, and what is evil.

Of course the Catholic church does communicate very clearly its position on good and evil, and it did with Hitler. It's pretty simple - anything that supports the church is good, anything that threatens the church is evil. Hitler initially did not threaten the church - therefore they had no issue with him.

It's true that human society seems to function better with rules, but there's no evidence 'a book' is essential, and most obviously to anyone with the slightest familiarity with history, there's no evidence religious books function especially well as moral guidelines.

And just where or how were these "moral guidelines" supposed to be kept; and who was supposed to be entrusted to convey them in the "intended" way without some kind of documentation by which to serve as a reference?

I understand that in 'your world' there are no cultures that use oral transmission of their shared history, but in the real world there are many. Your lack of knowledge can be fixed you know, you just have to make an effort.I even gave you a hint in the post you are responding to, but I guess you must have missed it in your apoplectic haste. Here it is again - "Those who think we do 'need a book' are ignoring reality. They ignore that human civilisation pre-dates writing, demonstrating that cooperative social organisation is possible in the absence of 'books'. This circumstance has existed even until recent times within isolated communities that (often) rely onoral histories of cultureto maintain good order and cooperation. Some of these isolated cultures have (successfully) maintained social organisation for so long it makes the Judeo-Christianity thing seem like a transitory fad in comparison."

You are missing the point by leaps and bounds (as usual). The issue is not so much about their being a "religious book" somewhere but rather the basis for which many such religious books [or script,tablets, or even pictograms] came into being and the purpose it served within a given society.

No. It's you who is missing the point despite that you vaguely hint at it with this ^^^. It's perfectly obvious that morality and ethics exist independently of, and precede, crackpot religious beliefs.

The witch hysteria in the US was inspired by and used the authority of a well known religious book to inflict what were far from 'decent' or 'moral' punishments on entirely innocent people.

^ this is another example of your intellectual dishonesty; because you know quite well that the individuals you refer to were FAR from being just and true practitioners of their faith!

This is a fine example of the evasive use of the 'no true scotsman' fallacy. The point someone was foolishly trying to make was that religion/god is required to produce 'morality and ethics', whereas, on the contrary, it's perfectly possible (and indeed common) for people to behave entirely immorally and unethically whilst clutching a 'god inspired religious book' - and even, while clutching their 'religious book', use it as an inspirational authority to commit grossly immoral and unethical deeds. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman

First show me, in what part of the NT does it indicate that JC instructed his believers to Torture or Burn pple (or Cats) suspected of practicing Witchcraft?

You are trying to move the goalposts, though as an aside the story of the 'Gadarene Swine' suggests that JC (assuming he existed) believed that 'possession' by 'evil spirits' was a reasonable idea.But anyway, no one claimed there was an explicit instruction to burn cats, the point - which appears to have flown over your head - was that so-called all-that-is-needed absolute and timelessly unchanging religious moral authority and guidance did not alert people to the fact that wanton cruelty is not entertainment.Morality and ethics are clearly not absolutes, despite the frequent claims by religious nutters that they are.

Do you really think you need a book to be a morally normal, decent human being?

Those who think we do 'need a book' are ignoring reality.

They ignore that human civilisation pre-dates writing, demonstrating that cooperative social organisation is possible in the absence of 'books'. This circumstance has existed even until recent times within isolated communities that (often) rely on oral histories of culture to maintain good order and cooperation. Some of these isolated cultures have (successfully) maintained social organisation for so long it makes the Judeo-Christianity thing seem like a transitory fad in comparison.

They also ignore that "morally normal (&) decent" are relative terms, so that as recently as just a couple of hundred years ago in places that possessed 'books' such as highly religious (catholic) France it was considered public entertainment to burn several cats alive in a bag over a fire - the yowling was most diverting apparently.The witch hysteria in the US was inspired by and used the authority of a well known religious book to inflict what were far from 'decent' or 'moral' punishments on entirely innocent people.

It's true that human society seems to function better with rules, but there's no evidence 'a book' is essential, and most obviously to anyone with the slightest familiarity with history, there's no evidence religious books function especially well as moral guidelines.

That's ^^^ pretty funny. There's a similar thing just a few posts up the page.

A certain poster criticises Obama by saying -

...from race relations to diplomacy he demonstrates lack of good judgment and discretion.

Yet earlier in the same post she had proposed that Tom Cotton, the unqualified and inexperienced oaf who blundered in to diplomatic negotiations between the US, Briton, Russia, China, France, Germany, the UN and Iran with an ill-judged and highly indiscreet open letter, would make a 'great conservative leader'.

That people of a certain political persuasion have such an enormous capacity for oblivious and breathtakingly hypocritical irony suggests, to me, that the very thing that unites them all is some kind of shared defect.

US senators' open letter to the Iranian leadership over nuclear negotiations reveals breathtaking hubris and reminds us that not all dangerous ideologues reside in the Middle East...

The problem with ideologues is that while they are ready to criticise others for their rigidly held viewpoints, they are rarely ready to recognise that they are equally rigid and intolerant.Nowhere is that on better display than in the recent controversy surrounding the nuclear negotiations with Iran.[snip]Now I understand that junior senators like senator Tom Cotton want to make a political name for themselves, have always had president Barack Obama in their sights, and see issues such as this as a way to do it. But if 50 members of the Iranian Majlis had sent a similarly worded letter to the US president, what do you think the reaction of the US public, let alone the conservative faction in American politics, would have been?

What the letter did reveal though, is the sort of hubris that only committed ideologues can demonstrate. The sort of hubris that precipitated the White House's 2003 decision to invade Iraq as a precursor to a "flowering of democracy" among countries and cultures and within a region that few (if any) of the key decision-makers had any idea about. The sort of hubris that also depicts the nuclear negotiations as a bilateral negotiation between Washington and Tehran.

Unfortunately, as the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, pointed out, the negotiations involve the P5+1 with an agreement that may eventually be backed by a UN Security Council resolution.

So the US Senators' open letter should have also been addressed to the British prime minister, the Russian, Chinese and French presidents, the German chancellor and the secretary-general of the UN. Because, by Senator Cotton's logic, he also put all of these leaders on notice that none of them should expect Washington to keep its word on any future agreement.

[snip]

There is a deep thread of exceptionalism that runs through both American and Iranian notions of self. The problem with conservative ideologues from both countries that harbour this notion of exceptionalism is that they rarely understand that it isn't a view shared by anyone outside their respective countries.

Without a modicum of self-awareness, such mindsets can lead to foreign policy adventurism as they both believe in their divinely-ordained right to lead. And, while the embarrassing letter has been seen for what it is, it reveals a way of thinking that reminds us that not all dangerous ideologues reside in the Middle East.

And speaking of dangerous ideologues, like the religious right in the US, who blend their politics with beliefs about their 'divinely-ordained right' to operate on the world stage... here's a link to an interesting article (a warning for those with short attention spans - it's long) about the underlying motivations of ISIS, it suggests that ISIS are basically an extreme literalist apocalyptic cult who are trying to trigger the 'foretold apocalypse' in the designated spot.

The war mongering ideologues in the US - some of whom seem to favour invasions over negotiation - are playing right into their hands.

A few extracts -

What ISIS Really WantsThe Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy - and for how to stop it.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior.In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

For certain true believers -- the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles -- visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.

President Obama denounced a group of Republican senators Monday for warning Iran that any nuclear deal could be a temporary one, calling it an attempt to undermine the administration's foreign policy.

"It's somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran," Obama said of an open letter from Republicans who have questioned the prospect of a nuclear agreement. "It's an unusual coalition."

It's bizarre that partisan politics in your country has gone so far that some of them are seeking to enlist the help of a foreign country to thwart the foreign policy aims of the legitimate US government.It certainly is an unusual coalition.

C'est la vie de la ouvre la port type exclamation. Kangaroo dundee has came down from super duper intelligent mountain to reply to a post made by poor auld unintelligent me . Crivvens jings and help ma boab.

It would have to be latex kangaroo as i dont want to see a whole herd of coos dying just to make me a leather outfit. And noooooooooo nae small furry creatures get killed although i have been known to choke the chicken (calm down frank i meant my OWN chicken).

I can understand your confusion kangaroo though as you are one of the self proclaimed big headed ones. Or was it huge brained ones? Saying that a huge liberal type brain would need a huge liberal type head i suppose.

Tis but a simple question though. The j'accuse finger pointing of islamophobia is forever used on here by big headed/brained intolerant liberal types. Now as islamic state is a case of muslims running things as they want to run them does that mean any criticism of said islamic state make the person criticising islamophobic then?

Or are the mad muslims in islamic state the type of islamics it is ok to hiss at? I'm sure you or any other large headed/brained self proclaimed intellectuals can offer an answer to poor no very bright me.

Here kangaroo are you going to be spongefrank squareheads 'friend'?

Are all Welsh alcoholics as incoherent as you? Or is it only the poorly educated ones?

Do you realise your posts don't make much sense? Large headed people with huge brains? Latex kangaroos and leather outfits? Furry creatures getting killed, chickens and SpongeBob Squarepants? You should probably ease up on the meths, it sounds like you're living inside some kind of alcoholic hallucination.

Now obviously frank will know the answer to this (i noticed he knew all about penis' being sucked on another thread) but is there any non attention seeking posters who could maybe shed some light on this for me please?

Us normal folk who post are usually branded istismophobic by the intolerant liberal types on here when they get all hissy like a feral cat on its dodgers. But what about opposition to IS or ISIS or whatever its called? Now that mad islamists have set up their own state and are getting like minded mad islamists flocking to join them from all over the world is it islamophobic to oppose them and slag them off?

Surely it must be using the criteria that the intolerant liberals use on here? So basically intolerant ones are we normal posters islamophobic in our hatred of isis/is and if yous hate isis/is are YOUS islamophobic then?

Or is that 'different' innit?

Now obviously, only a totally insane poster who likes to torture kittens while wearing a latex outfit will be able to explain or add anything to the above ^^^ post. So who would like to shed some light on what it is trying to say?

Surely that's a reasonable request, innit?

Poisoning the well

Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a rhetorical device where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say. Poisoning the well can be a special case of argumentum ad hominem, and the term was first used with this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). The origin of the term lies in well poisoning, an ancient wartime practice of pouring poison into sources of fresh water before an invading army, to diminish the attacking army's strength.

StructurePoisoning the well can take the form of an (explicit or implied) argument, and is considered by some philosophers an informal fallacy.

A poisoned-well "argument" has the following form: 1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false, relevant or irrelevant) about person A (the target) is presented by another. (e.g., "Before you listen to my opponent, may I remind you that he has been in jail.") 2. Implicit conclusion: "Therefore, any claims made by person A cannot be relied upon".

A subcategory of this form is the application of an unfavorable attribute to any future opponents, in an attempt to discourage debate. (For example, "That's my stance on funding the public education system, and anyone who disagrees with me hates children.") Any person who steps forward to dispute the claim will then risk applying the tag to him or herself in the process.

A poisoned-well "argument" can also be in this form: 1. Unfavorable definitions (be it true or false) which prevent disagreement (or enforce affirmative position) 2. Any claims without first agreeing with above definitions are automatically dismissed.

It's interesting that many of the same people in this thread frothing at the mouth about 'Pakistani' gangs and 'Muslims' are the same people who often comment that the (alleged) lack of condemnation by moderate muslims in regard to the activities of islamic terrorists means moderate (or all) muslims must secretely condone the activities of the lunatic fringe.

Yet here they are, the very same people, failing to condemn the larger problem of human trafficking? They just ignore that and focus on a narrow area that supports their familiar agenda.

By their own logic... because they do not loudly and continuously condemn the much larger activities of international human traffickers - they must secretly, perhaps enthusiastically, condone what non-Pakistani and non-muslim people-trafficking criminals are up to.

Try to be consistent guys... does your conspicuous lack of outrage at the activities of European criminal gangs mean you actually support the international sex trade?

Human trafficking, especially of girls and women, often leads to forced prostitution and sexual slavery. According to a report by the UNODC, internationally, the most common destinations for victims of human trafficking are Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States. The major sources of trafficked persons are Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_prostitution

EuropeIt is estimated that two thirds of women trafficked for prostitution worldwide annually come from Eastern Europe and China, three-quarters of whom have never worked as prostitutes before. The major destinations are Western Europe, Turkey, the Middle East (Israel, the United Arab Emirates), Asia, Russia and the United States.USAIn 2002, the US Department of State repeated an earlier CIA estimate that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "here and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman conditions -- in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes." In addition to internationally trafficked victims, American citizens are also forced into prostitution. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, "100,000 to 293,000 children are in danger of becoming sexual commodities."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_prostitution

In the U.S., human trafficking tends to occur around international travel-hubs with large immigrant populations, notably California and Texas. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 17,500 people are trafficked into the country every year, but the true figure could be higher, because of the large numbers of undocumented immigrants. Those being trafficked include young children, teenagers, men and women and can be domestic citizens or foreign nationals. According to the Department of State's statistics from 2000, there are approximately 244,000 American children and youth that are at risk for sex trafficking each year. Of these children and youth, 38,600 were originally runaways.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_United_States

Human trafficking is the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking

Liam Vernon, head of the UKHTC, said: "Human trafficking for the purposes of exploitation is an insidious and complex crime, and much of the exploitation is hidden from view."The National Crime Agency is committed to continually disrupting what is a vicious and criminal trade in human misery, which exploits the most vulnerable people, both here and abroad, for financial gain.The report found that Romania was the most prevalent country of origin for potential victims of trafficking in the UK for the third consecutive year. More than half of them were exploited for sex.http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-29417227

The number of people being trafficked into the UK is rising, latest government estimates suggest. Trafficking gangs in China, Vietnam, Nigeria and eastern Europe now pose the biggest threat to the UK, it said.Det Insp Kevin Hyland, of London's Metropolitan Police - which sees the UK's highest rates of trafficking - said some victims travelled to the UK in lorries or containers but the majority arrived lawfully, often accompanied by their traffickers."The vast majority of them think they're coming to a better life in the UK," he said.Many victims are promised jobs in the hotel or leisure industry, or as interpreters, but when they arrive they are "groomed or threatened" and used for sexual exploitation, forced labour or both, he said.Immigration minister Mark Harper said the results demonstrated UK professionals were getting better at "spotting" the crime due to "cross-government" cooperation."We're doing a better job of cracking down people involved in the vile trade," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.But the number of those prosecuted was "not enough," he said."One of the things we do is to prosecute people for the most serious offences we can, and sometimes that's not a trafficking offence."http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19984615

allow me to remind all the smokies that this thread is about marijuana, not alcohol.

if you can please concentrate, maybe you can remember that.

if not, we who are dope free understand why you can't.

Actually the thread is about "Marijuana Legalization and the stereotype". It's says so right there in the title.Discussion of the "stereotype" and "legalisation" issues naturally allows the introduction of other addictive substances as an illustrator and/or contrast.

you are correct lying cheating cigarette hanging out of your mouth person!

I have addressed all my comments to the content of your posts. I've always used your correct user name and I've made no comments about your appearance.But if you'd like to change the dynamic it's no extra burden, seeing as I'm already exposing the stunted reasoning in your very short posts.

Endlessly spreading known lies, untruths, and corrupt distortions is what propagandists do. Propagandists are not concerned with the truth, they are like Super-Kardashians, selling a fiction they hope everyone will take to be true.

See, that's ^^^ (part of the reason) why I figure you're a paid propagandist... you've sold your dignity, sold your honour and are now just demeaning yourself for money. Just like the Kardashian family does. Though you may be doing it for free I guess, which is even sadder.

But maybe your posts are not entirely lying propaganda?

he refused to order flags flown at half mast for General Greene but did so when drug addict Whitney Houston died from an alcohol and drug over dose in a bathroom.

There was no national order to lower the flags by President Obama for singer Whitney Houston.

An order to lower the flags in the state of New Jersey was issued by Governor Chris Christie. This according to a February 14, 2012 article by NJ.Com, a news site based in New Jersey, that said, Governor "Chris Christie plans to sign an executive order requesting flags on public buildings in New Jersey to fly at half-staff on the day of Jersey native Whitney Houston's funeral." http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/t/Whitney-Houston-Shirley-Temple.htm#.VPEZBhZBmHs

Gov. Chris Christie announced he would fly the state's flags at half-staff for the singer Saturday as mourners attend her funeral in Newark, New Jersey.http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/18/opinion/marsh-whitney-houston-tribute/

Obama never ordered flags lowered for Houston. It was Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, where Houston was born, who ordered all state flags to be flown at half-staff in her honor...http://jacksonville.com/news/2013-04-28/story/fact-check-did-obama-order-flags-be-flown-half-staff-whitney-houston-not-navy

Rush Limbaugh defended New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to order flags in his state to be flown at half-staff on the day of the late singer Whitney Houston’s funeral...http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72995.html

Oops!So should he have ordered the flag lowered for Greene, a distinguished member of the Armed Forces?

It's not really his prerogative. The Governor of the state Greene came from could have had them lowered in his home state pretty easily, but it's very very rare apparently for a president to have all the flags lowered.

4 U.S. Code Chapter 1 - THE FLAG4 U.S. Code § 7 - Position and manner of display(m) The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day. On Memorial Day the flag should be displayed at half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff.

By order of the President, the flag shall be flown at half-staff upon the death of principal figures of the United States Government and the Governor of a State, territory, or possession, as a mark of respect to their memory. In the event of the death of other officials or foreign dignitaries, the flag is to be displayed at half-staff according to Presidential instructions or orders, or in accordance with recognized customs or practices not inconsistent with law.

In the event of the death of a present or former official of the government of any State, territory, or possession of the United States or the death of a member of the Armed Forces from any State, territory, or possession who dies while serving on active duty, the Governor of that State, territory, or possession may proclaim that the National flag shall be flown at half-staff, and the same authority is provided to the Mayor of the District of Columbia with respect to present or former officials of the District of Columbia and members of the Armed Forces from the District of Columbia.

When the Governor of a State, territory, or possession, or the Mayor of the District of Columbia, issues a proclamation under the preceding sentence that the National flag be flown at half-staff in that State, territory, or possession or in the District of Columbia because of the death of a member of the Armed Forces, the National flag flown at any Federal installation or facility in the area covered by that proclamation shall be flown at half-staff consistent with that proclamation.

The flag shall be flown at half-staff 30 days from the death of the President or a former President; 10 days from the day of death of the Vice President, the Chief Justice or a retired Chief Justice of the United States, or the Speaker of the House of Representatives; from the day of death until interment of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a Secretary of an executive or military department, a former Vice President, or the Governor of a State, territory, or possession; and on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress. The flag shall be flown at half-staff on Peace Officers Memorial Day, unless that day is also Armed Forces Day.https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/4/chapter-1https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/4/7

Google is your friend.

he actually put flags at half mast for Houston and the all the other things he did and did not do.

why can't ONE SINGLE PERSON ON HERE SAY YEAH THAT WAS INCREDIBLY STUPID??

I accept your challenge."YEAH THAT WAS INCREDIBLY STUPID" of you to make that claim, when the truth is so easily found.

What's next...

he let.... decorated Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi languish in a Mexican jail without lifting a finger to obtain his release for a long period of time.

Gosh! Did he?

Although many things about the case against former Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi are murky, one thing is clear:We should all be so lucky to have such a fiercely devoted mother.Jill Tahmooressi's deft plucking of American heartstrings has been amplified by the Fox News echo chamber, helping turn her son's story into both a conservative cause celebre and a minor political headache for the Obama administration.

What we know about her 25-year-old son is that he acquitted himself with valor on the field of battle during two tours in Afghanistan, and made some whopping mistakes upon his return, including driving across the border on March 31 with three loaded guns in his truck, a serious violation of Mexican law, for which he is now on trial.

Thanks to the ruckus his mother kicked up, he is now receiving the kind of special treatment that his fellow prisoners can only dream about.

[He has made] ...two escape attempts, including one described as a "ninja-style scaling of a wall topped with coiled barbed wire," and an incident in which he slashed his neck with a broken lightbulb. After that, he was moved to El Hongo prison in Tecate, one of a handful of Mexican prisons accredited by the American Correctional Assn., where he is now living in what his mother describes as "solitary confinement" and what others have called a "private cell."

There, he receives frequent visits from a pastor and is allowed to spend up to two hours a day on the phone. On Monday, after a five-hour hearing in Tijuana's federal courthouse, Judge Victor Octavio Luna Escobedo allowed him to spend 20 minutes with his mother, as families of other defendants in court that day stood outside the building, hoping for glimpses of their loved ones.

"From the moment of his arrest, Mr. Tahmooressi's fundamental rights have been respected, including the rights to due process and personal integrity," the Mexican attorney general's office said in a statement in May.

....To find Tahmooressi guilty, the judge will have to determine that he intended to break the law by bringing military-style weapons and ammunition into Mexico, which has strict anti-gun laws.

In May, sources showed the arrest video to a reporter for Tijuana’s fearless weekly magazine Zeta.In a story headlined "Ex-Marine did not enter Mexico by mistake," Ines Garcia Ramos reported that around 10:30 p.m. on March 31, as Tahmooressi began to drive into Mexico, border officers who noticed a mattress and other large items in his truck waved him over to an inspection area, where his weapons were discovered during a search. Contrary to his assertion that he stopped to ask how to return to the U.S., she wrote, he appeared to be driving away from the border. (After his guns were discovered, he called 911, telling an American operator he had crossed the border "by accident ... and they're trying to take my guns from me.")

...At times, unfortunately, this young man has been his own worst enemy. After he was arrested, for instance, he claimed he had never been to Mexico before. In fact, he had crossed the border several times, including earlier on the day of his arrest...

...Obama administration officials have been closely monitoring the case from the beginning. “Quite frankly, Mr. Tahmooressi’s case has gotten a tremendous amount of attention from the State Department,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John D. Feeley, the No. 2 official in the department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and former Marine Corps officer. “This is a case we have raised repeatedly and at high levels with the Mexicans. Secretary [John F.] Kerry did it in May. I have raised the case with the Mexican ambassador in Washington, our ambassador in Mexico has raised it with the [Mexican] foreign secretary and we have had excellent cooperation in that we have had access to him on a regular basis.”

...Tahmooressi is not a prisoner of war, neither is he on active duty.

Since 2008, Congress has appropriated $2.1 billion to help Mexico deepen its commitment to the rule of law. How foolish and hypocritical to demand that Mexico now ignore the very justice system we've encouraged it to create.http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-tahmooressi-spin-machine-20140807-column.html#page=1

So... Mr. Tahmooressi tried to enter a foreign country with prohibited goods, made things worse for himself by lying, and then made an attempt to escape.They weren't going to execute him. They didn't hold him without trial or charge for years in an off-shore prison. They didn't torture him. They didn't invent a law, post-date it, and apply it retro-actively to him. The outcome was most unlikely to be horribly catastrophic, but rather was just an unpleasant, though foreseeable consequence.

You don't respect the rule of law then? You don't understand international sovereignty? The concept of not entering a country with goods prohibited in that country is incomprehensible to you?

Now it's your turn. I'm sure you'll be grateful, if you are an honest and ethical person, for the opportunity to correct the erroneous claims referred to above. So I look forward to your retraction, and admission that promulgating false claims is "bizarre behavior" and is an "INCREDIBLY STUPID" thing to do.

^^^^^TGIF, not worth responding to. What good person would ever want to watch another human being eat shyt and die? No one who spouts these venomous words is worth consideration.

What are you talking about? I'll concede you are probably an expert on the spouting of venomous words, but you're clearly not so good at following discussions and remembering who has said what.Besides, the humour and posting tendencies of those two posters reveal a shared fondness for playground poetry so I was just trying to be friendly and give them something to giggle over until they get called in for dinner, or to do their homework or something.

But How can any White Australian call us, (the U.S.A.), the most accommodating nation in the history of mankind of all races, Racist?

Aussis still house their Aborigines in caves.Interestingly, Aborigines who scientific communities believe are the closet thing we have to prehistoric man , still live in caves as they did 40,000 years ago, in Australia.The history of Indigenous Australians is thought to have spanned 40,000 to 45,000 years, although some estimates have put the figure at up to 80 000 years before European settlement .

About fifty percent of the aborigine population in Australia live nomadically; there choice (hopefully). Aussies have no leg to stand on when it comes to race relations.

So where are the condos, farm lands, hunting grounds specifically for your Aborigines?

This ^^^ is by no means accurate, though there is some truth in it. The way the colonial powers treated indigenous Australians was shameful, and it's an indictment of modern Australia that indigenous Australians are still so disadvantaged.Which is all very well, but raising it for the reason you have in this context makes an example of a tu quoque fallacy.

(Tu quoque (Latin for "you, too" or "you, also") or the appeal to hypocrisy is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position. This attempts to dismiss opponent's position based on criticism of the opponent's inconsistency and not the position presented.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque)

(Aborigines) …these great persons, who should be your national treasure, that are possibly direct decedents of Neanderthals...

"Decedents" are dead people, so I presume you mean 'descendents'.No modern humans are 'direct descendents of Neanderthals'. We overlapped with them in time, we did not descend from them. Traces of the Neanderthal genome are found in all population groups all over the world. If anything, Papuans and Aboriginals tend to have less Neanderthal DNA than other groups due to early isolation from European Neanderthal populations.Early Africans tend to have even less, because they never left Africa and so did not encounter either Neanderthals or Denisovians.

Say... do you think it's a worthwhile principle that ones beliefs should correspond to reality? Or is it OK to just disregard gaps in your knowledge and assert your beliefs as if they were actually meaningful.

First Aboriginal genome sequencedAlthough the Neanderthals and Denisovans ultimately went extinct, their genetic imprint remains. According to the results, the genomes of non-Africans today contain between between 1.5-2.1 percent Neanderthal genes, while the genomes of Australian aborigines, New Guineans and some Pacific Islanders come in around 6 percent Denisovan. Genomes of Native Americans and Han Chinese, as well as other mainland Asian populations, contain about 0.2 percent Denisovan genes, the researchers estimate.http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5365/20131219/neanderthal-genome-reveals-incest-interbreeding-and-mystery.htm

A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genomehttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.full

James Clapper talks about how times are most violent right now but John Kerry said yesterday how things haven't been as safe as it is now. Mr President, you may want to get your crew together(Kerry) and tell him to shut his mouth when talking.

Kerry is right. By all metrics we live in a less violent world than ever before.

Get a dose of reality.

A History of Violenceby Steven Pinker2007In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century.According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.Meanwhile, for another kind of violence--homicide--the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.http://stevenpinker.com/files/2007_03_19_new_republic_0.pdf

^^^And you've contaminated the atmosphere with toxic views for how many years?

There's no doubt you've diminished the lives of everyone who ever had the misfortune of hearing you express your sad and simple-minded opinions.You're like an excessively tedious wind-up toy, running through its predictable little repertoire of tricks over and over and over. Unable to do, or say, or think, anything original.

Actually, I suspect you're a paid propagandist.Because it stretches credibility that a real person could be so one-dimensional, so immune to rational input, and so discoursively dishonest.

Damn right. Take that tgif111... even your friends think you need therapy.

What Alcohol Really Does to Your BrainAlcohol directly affects brain chemistry by altering levels of neurotransmitters — the chemical messengers that transmit the signals throughout the body that control thought processes, behavior and emotion.http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/10/16/what-alcohol-really-does-to-your-brain/

ALCOHOL’S DAMAGING EFFECTS ON THE BRAINhttp://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm

Your Brain on AlcoholAlcohol is the most widely consumed drug worldwide.https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201006/your-brain-alcohol

And the thing is I just believe in one less god thanyou do and I'm in good company

Hang on, how do know your belief system is correct? Can you please provide some evidence that proves atheism is true?

You have confused yourself. Insert some other quality or property into the above phrase and re-read it. For instance... you might be mono-vehicular, you only drive one car. It's a true car, and the only one worth driving in your opinion.So a person says to you - I drive one less car than you.

What does that make them? A driver of some kind? Obviously it doesn't. They have informed you they do not drive, so trying to categorise them as an alternate type of driver is foolish.

So a person drives/believes in a particular god thing. It's a true god thing and the only one worth believing in, in their opinion.Another person says, I don't believe in your god thing.

What does that make the second person? A believer of some kind? Obviously it doesn't. They have informed you they do not believe, so trying, as you are, to categorise them as an alternate type of 'believer' is foolish.

Atheism isn't a belief 'system'. It's an absence of belief in relation to a singular and specific claim made by someone else.

You've been told all this how many times before? 30 times? 100 times? 500 times? You are either very very slow on the uptake, have the memory of a goldfish, or you are being dishonest. None of these alternatives reflect well on you.

Anyone's reality is based on what they 'know' and what they experience (and yes, I know all about perception and interpretation and root issues, etc). My realities and your realities are likely different because we've likely had different experiences.

That's fine - up to a point. There is an issue with the word know though... You are entitled to your own beliefs, but not to your own 'facts' - facts exist independent of 'beliefs'.Knowledge claims (to know) require evidential support. It isn't sufficient to claim you just 'know' something because of your 'experiences'. Anecdotes aren't evidence.

My focus is, based on what I "know" and what I've experienced, I CAN'T dismiss that there IS something else. That is rational thought and acceptance of "my" reality. Just like you can take your (speaking of anyone) experiences and realities and say there CAN'T be something else, I can't rationalize away my experiences and say there isn't.

That's fine too, as long as you don't mistake your 'knowledge' and beliefs about 'reality' for anything meaningful. The above is an argument from ignorance, it's validity depends on your capacity to comprehend there might be another way of looking at or understanding something - and it may or may not be 'rational' thought and acceptance of "your" reality'. Consider that (psychiatrically) deluded people could enunciate the exactly same justification as you just have to 'support' their, perhaps entirely irrational, delusions.

We have different experiences (or awareness of those experiences) that lead us to conclude different things, but they are both based on rational though.

Not necessarily. That's why it's important to test observations against reality. And test again.

They are also both based on not being able to change our realities or our thoughts on those to fit into another's belief. We can't understand or accept - adopt each other's beliefs because what we "know" contradicts that. It doesn't make what we "know" wrong, just different.

It depends on whether a person thinks it's important their thought processes and conclusions should reflect known, independently observable, facts. Or not.Without thorough testing of ones observations it may well mean, contrary to your claim, that what you "know" is completely wrong.

Many people in North Korea 'know' their Dear Leader invented penicillin, can fight lions bare handed, can breathe underwater.... etc etc but this isn't actual knowledge and it doesn't reflect reality, they are just beliefs. Their beliefs, based on their 'experience' and 'knowledge' are not just 'different', they are wrong. Many jealous husbands 'believe' their wives are cheating on them - they just 'know' it, based on a 'feeling'. It may or may not be true, it may or may not reflect reality. There's no way of telling using those methods. So their convictions are not 'knowledge', they are beliefs.

Reality testing would reveal the facts in both these examples, and it's not 'rational' (if you have the means) to avoid undertaking it simply because you are fond of the belief set you have. Keep it if you like, but don't pretend it's 'knowledge', and don't pretend it necessarily reflects any thing real.

Our experiences, hence realities, are different.

That's true. But all 'realities' are not equal. Some of them mirror independently observable 'reality' much closer than others, some enjoy much evidentially support. Others, not so much.In 'your reality' the earth might be 6000 years old, but that doesn't mean the earth really is 6000 years old. It means your reality is faulty.

After years of the liberal-progressive Democrats shouting from the rooftops that shootings like this don't happen in Europe as Europe doesn't allow guns, guess the truth comes out. There are guns in Europe, multiple killings happen in a single incident in Europe, and according to the report, it was a person doing the shooting (liberal mantra has been for decades guns kill people).

Are you saying he didn't use a gun to kill the people? And who has said "shootings like this don't happen in Europe"? They still happen, but they're rare. Note too that it wasn't a crazed criminal doing the shooting - the type everyone needs gunz to defend themselves against.It was licenced gun owner with no criminal record.

A gunman has opened fire at a restaurant in the Czech Republic, killing eight people before shooting himself dead, officials say.Police described it as the worst mass shooting incident on record. Such shootings are rare in the country, says the BBC's Rob Cameron in Prague, but with hunting a popular hobby many people in rural areas own weapons.http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31608932

A "crazy murderer" walked into a restaurant Tuesday in the eastern Czech Republic, killing eight people before he took his own life, authorities said.The result was one of the Czech Republic's deadliest mass murders in about 40 years."We have never seen anything like this before," said Tomas Tuhy, the head of the Czech Republic's national police. "This is a tragedy."http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/24/europe/czech-shooting/

PRAGUE, Czech Republic – Hundreds of residents of a small town in southeastern Czech Republic gathered Wednesday to honour the victims of the worst shooting attack in the country’s history.Braving rain, they lit candles in front of the Druzba, or “Friendship,” restaurant in Uhersky Brod a day after a gunman opened fire during lunchtime, killing eight and seriously wounding a woman before he fatally shot himself.Police identified the gunman as a 63-year-old local man who had no criminal record and had a gun license.http://globalnews.ca/news/1849229/czech-town-honours-victims-killed-in-restaurant-mass-shooting/

See ^^^ rare & shocking. The worst shooting incident in the country's history.

Meanwhile, in the US... there have been 30 mass shootings since the start of the year, with 51 people killed, and 90 wounded.

There is no such thing as absolute truth. You believe you exist, but how do you prove it? Through other people? The influence you have on them or things in the world? All of those things are subject to perception and therefore aren't factually based.

It really doesn't matter that much whether there is or isn't such a thing as "absolute truth". Evidentially supported approximations work quite well most of the time.If you succeed in casting doubt on the possibility you exist, then that gives me (and maybe most people) a pretty good reason to not pay any attention to anything you appear to be saying.

Think about it.

I make the assumption that I exist, of course, but, again, I can't empirically prove that to be true.

Only mathematicians obsess over 'proofs'. Evidence is sufficient for most propositions.

If what you mean be 'exist' is to possess agency, to be present here and now, able to observe and be observed, then that's good enough.Additionally, you might contrast any assumptions you make about the possible likelihood that you actually exist by observing the characteristics of 'things' similar to you that are known not to exist and see if you exhibit similar characteristics.

For instance, dead people who no longer exist. Is there a significant difference between you and the average dead person? What is it?

Once, on Facebook, a friend of mine posted up a theory expressed to him on a religious level. The theory goes like this: since time is imaginary and everyone exists simultaneously, (he believes)that we are all, in fact, the same soul repeating life over and over. Everyone you encounter in your life is simply either a past life of yours or a future life of yours. It goes on to suggest that the rat race we call life only ends when that one soul completes the circuit and has lived all possible lives and that is how we earn our place in heaven.

I, personally, reject this based on my own individuality, but can't logically deny the theory because to do so implies that I have knowledge beyond human understanding.

That ^^^ isn't a 'theory'. It's a series of groundless assumptions built into a flight of fancy pulled out of thin air. It isn't necessary to 'logically deny' it since there isn't any 'logic' in it to deny.

Any number of of such 'theories' can be produced at will.

We might all be bacteria living around the anal fissure of a giant blue unicorn. The rat race we call life only ends when the unicorn takes a dump we slide off with the turd.No wait! We might all be unicorns just imagining we are people so that we learn to understand quantum perfection and the universal balance of which we are all a unicorn-shaped part... Alternately... we might all be god shaped things in natural communion with the oneness of eternity just imagining we are bacteria on a unicorns bum so we learn to appreciate what shitty lives some people have and we can use the glorious omnipotent power we all have without realising it yet in ways that benefit the holy sacredness of the universally timeless quantumness of eternity, or something.

Perhaps you'll agree that the 'Sermon on the Mount', during which Jesus (allegedly) delivered the 'Lord's Prayer' is a particularly significant episode in the life of Jesus, and that many of the things he (allegedly) said in the course of this sermon form part of the core foundational beliefs of many/most christians?

Yet, two of the gospels don't even mention it, and the accounts of it in the two that do mention it differ as to what was said, where it took place, and when.

(abridged)

The 'Lord’s Prayer' is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew (69-13) and the Gospel of Luke (112-4). But it is not in the Gospel of Mark or John. In each of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke Jesus’ invitation for teaching it are different. In the Gospel of Matthew it is part of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus is instructing his disciples how to pray unlike how the hypocrites, who pray standing up in synagogues and street corners. In the Gospel of Luke he teaches the disciples after they request to be taught how to pray.

Moreover, it's derivative. The Lords prayer has its roots in the Jewish liturgy and scriptures (the Talmud) and it shares themes with the Kaddish prayer found in the Jewish prayer service.Matthew and Luke have taken this prayer and placed it on the lips of Jesus for different reasons. Whether Jesus actually prayed this prayer, we can never know (maybe as a good Jew he did). We do know, that when or if Jesus said anything, he said it in Aramaic.http://stmaryssouthbrisbane.com/2012/09/terry-fitzpatrick-homilist-september-21-22-2012/#content

(abridged)

Essays upon some Controverted Questions Thomas Henry HuxleyProblem of The Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount

In the course of the present discussion it has been asserted that the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "Lord's Prayer" furnish a summary and condensed view of the essentials of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, set forth by himself. Now this supposed Summa of Nazarene theology distinctly affirms the existence of a spiritual world, of a Heaven, and of a Hell of fire; it teaches the Fatherhood of God and the malignity of the Devil; it declares the superintending providence of the former and our need of deliverance from the machinations of the latter; it affirms the fact of demoniac possession and the power of casting out devils by the faithful.

I am of opinion that there is the gravest reason for doubting whether the "Sermon on the Mount" was ever preached, and whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" was ever prayed, by Jesus of Nazareth. My reasons for this opinion are, among others, these:—There is now no doubt that the three Synoptic Gospels, so far from being the work of three independent writers, are closely interdependent, and that in one of two ways. Either all three contain, as their foundation, versions, to a large extent verbally identical, of one and the same tradition; or two of them are thus closely dependent on the third; and the opinion of the majority of the best critics has of late years more and more converged towards the conviction that our canonical second gospel (the so-called "Mark's" Gospel) is that which most closely represents the primitive groundwork of the three. That I take to be one of the most valid results of New Testament criticism, of immeasurably greater importance than the discussion about dates and authorship.

But if, as I believe to be the case, beyond any rational doubt or dispute, the second gospel is the nearest extant representative of the oldest tradition, whether written or oral, how comes it that it contains neither the "Sermon on the Mount" nor the "Lord's Prayer," those typical embodiments... of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus? Not only does "Mark's" gospel fail to contain the "Sermon on the Mount," or anything but a very few of the sayings contained in that collection; but, at the point of the history of Jesus where the "Sermon" occurs in "Matthew," there is in "Mark" an apparently unbroken narrative from the calling of James and John to the healing of Simon's wife's mother. Thus the oldest tradition not only ignores the "Sermon on the Mount," but, by implication, raises a probability against its being delivered when and where the later "Matthew" inserts it in his compilation.

And still more weighty is the fact that the third gospel, the author of which tells us that he wrote after "many" others had "taken in hand" the same enterprise; who should therefore have known the first gospel (if it existed), and was bound to pay to it the deference due to the work of an apostolic eye-witness (if he had any reason for thinking it was so)—this writer, who exhibits far more literary competence than the other two, ignores any "Sermon on the Mount," such as that reported by "Matthew," just as much as the oldest authority does. Yet "Luke" has a great many passages identical, or parallel, with those in "Matthew's" "Sermon on the Mount," which are, for the most part, scattered about in a totally different connection.

Interposed, however, between the nomination of the Apostles and a visit to Capernaum; occupying, therefore, a place which answers to that of the "Sermon on the Mount" in the first gospel, there is, in the third gospel, a discourse which is as closely similar to the "Sermon on the Mount," in some particulars, as it is widely unlike it in others.

This discourse is said to have been delivered in a "plain" or "level place" (Luke vi. 17), and by way of distinction we may call it the "Sermon on the Plain."

I see no reason to doubt that the two Evangelists are dealing, to a considerable extent, with the same traditional material; and a comparison of the two "Sermons" suggests very strongly that "Luke's" version is the earlier. The correspondences between the two forbid the notion that they are independent. They both begin with a series of blessings, some of which are almost verbally identical. In the middle of each (Luke vi. 27-38, Matt. v. 43-48) there is a striking exposition of the ethical spirit of the command given in Leviticus xix. 18. And each ends with a passage containing the declaration that a tree is to be known by its fruit, and the parable of the house built on the sand. But while there are only 29 verses in the "Sermon on the Plain" there are 107 in the "Sermon on the Mount;" the excess in length of the latter being chiefly due to the long interpolations, one of 30 verses before and one of 34 verses after, the middlemost parallelism with Luke. Under these circumstances it is quite impossible to admit that there is more probability that "Matthew's" version of the Sermon is historically accurate than there is that Luke's version is so; and they cannot both be accurate.

"Luke" either knew the collection of loosely-connected and aphoristic utterances which appear under the name of the "Sermon on the Mount" in "Matthew;" or he did not. If he did not, he must have been ignorant of the existence of such a document as our canonical "Matthew," a fact which does not make for the genuineness, or the authority, of that book. If he did, he has shown that he does not care for its authority on a matter of fact of no small importance; and that does not permit us to conceive that he believed the first gospel to be the work of an authority to whom he ought to defer, let alone that of an apostolic eye-witness.

The tradition of the Church about the second gospel, which I believe to be quite worthless, but which is all the evidence there is for "Mark's" authorship, would have us believe that "Mark" was little more than the mouthpiece of the apostle Peter. Consequently, we are to suppose that Peter either did not know, or did not care very much for, that account of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus which is contained in the Sermon on the Mount....

I thought that all fairly attentive and intelligent students of the gospels, to say nothing of theologians of reputation, knew these things. But how can any one who does know them have the conscience to ask whether there is "any reasonable doubt" that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Jesus of Nazareth?

Its not propaganda if it is true, if the people in ISIS are Muslim and they have declared a world wide caliphate then they know better what they believe than you.

If it's true? You think their claims are legitimate? It's a true claim? They really are the legitimate Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant?So that's why we should, according to you, respect their choice of name?

No, no lies about God, no lies are allowed in the Bible, That is our Sacred Book, we all go by those laws.

The bible could accurately be described as 'A Book of Lies'. It's a twisted variant of earlier myths - rewritten with a different tribe in the starring role, that's been re-interpreted almost to death as various parts of it have been conclusively shown to conflict with known, and obvious, reality.

The Bible is not twisted, it is TRANSLATED this means the textual changes in the modern translations did not affect any major doctrine.

You either miss, or ignore, the point. The book you call 'The Bible' is littered with contradictions, inaccuracies and factual errors. This obvious fact tends to discredit the claim that it is a documentary representative of 'holy sacred truth'.

What's more, it is derived from earlier Babylonian and Chaldean myths - sometimes word for word (parts of the flood story for instance) and sometimes adapted to accommodate the revised 'chosen' tribe. It's just a collection of foundation myths with the nominal authors written-in to occupy the starring role.

Inconvenient or outrageously contradictory parts have been excised, and then, as you refer to, it's been 'translated' through a series of languages - which gave more opportunity for those so inclined to 'improve' the text.

It's interesting in exactly the same way as the quran and the bhagavad gita are, the same way the Greek god stories are, the same way the Nordic god stories are, the same way the Roman god stories are... or even the writings of Plato and Homer. Relics, signposts to 'what people thought' a long time ago.

You pretend to 'know'. Just like all the other religions pretend they 'know' their god thing/s are 'true' and yours isn't .

Wrong on this,As always. Nobody said that one God is true and the other no.All the religious principles are the same, which are:1- Faith,2-love3-beliefReligious know there is only ONE GOD. (With different names) but only ONE and the SAME.

You are seriously deluded. There are thousands of claimed god things. Is this 'ONE GOD' Zeus? Apollo? Axalotl?

Hinduism alone recognises about 4 million deity spirits. Where do they fit into your 'ONE GOD' idea? And assuming you can squeeze them into your concept, how do think the Hindu's will feel about it?Is Mohommed in there with Shiva do you think? Squirming around inside Yahweh, feeling the luurrve.

It isn't 'a fact'. It's your belief. If it was 'a fact' you'd be able to produce supporting evidence. Which rather conspicuously, you don't - because you can't.

We have the evidence within us, in the things that happen to us in real life, each person with faith has different evidence, because of the different problems in their life.God shows His love and care for every person with faith, in individual form.There your FACT.!!

Anecdotes are not facts - they are stories. Evidence can move anecdotes along the road toward facthood, but once again... you do not produce any. You're not alone though, none of the other religions can produce any either - they just say the exact same things as you. And they believe (just like you), based on their 'faith' (just like you), that their god thing (just like yours) is looking after them, so they pray (just like you) really hard but their god thing is about as interested in them as yours is in you.

Again,We are not pretending, In fact, we feel that God is close to us,In fact, we feel that He is taking care of us.

Adherents of all religions die in the exact proportions one would expect given their representation in the community - in natural disasters, of illness and disease, in accidents.Your favourite god thing is clearly asleep on the job.

You are wrong as always.God is not sleeping, He is working…….

I'm not wrong. You can prove I am if you like, rather than just claim I am. All you need to do is show some religious group does not die in natural disasters at the same rate as everyone else. Or perhaps that a particular religious group tends to have more wins on the lottery than one might expect given their representation in the demographic statistics.

Why doesn't all that fervent praying have some effect?

Do christians recover from serious heart attacks at a greater proportion than sikhs? Or do both die at about the rate expected?

If someone claims their god thing has agency (is taking care of them all) then it should be detectable. But it isn't. Which is, like... a serious problem for the claim, because it fails.

Take an honest reality check. All religions make the same claims your favourite religion makes. They all rely on faith and belief as substitutes for evidence. They all claim access to 'revealed sacred holy truths'.They are all without doubt, and certain their 'holy book' is the word of the most holy > insert favourite god thing < who is always right and never makes mistakes.

Yet many of these god claims contradict one another.

It's obvious that 'faith' and 'belief' are not reliable methods of determining what is real and what isn't.

If that's ^^^ true, and isn't just a dimwitted lie told by an intellectually corrupt wanker who doesn't understand the concept of rational discourse, you should be able - very easily - to prove it.

Here's a definition of 'cherry picking' to help you -

Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias. Cherry picking may be committed intentionally or unintentionally. This fallacy is a major problem in public debate.

The term is based on the perceived process of harvesting fruit, such as cherries. The picker would be expected to only select the ripest and healthiest fruits. An observer who only sees the selected fruit may thus wrongly conclude that most, or even all, of the fruit is in such good condition. A less common type of cherry picking is to gather only fruit that is easy to harvest ignoring quality fruit higher up the tree. This can also give observers a false impression about the quality of fruit on the tree.

Cherry picking can be found in many logical fallacies. For example, the "fallacy of anecdotal evidence" tends to overlook large amounts of data in favor of that known personally, "selective use of evidence" rejects material unfavorable to an argument, while a false dichotomy picks only two options when more are available. Cherry picking can refer to the selection of data or data sets so a study or survey will give desired, predictable results which may be misleading or even completely contrary to actuality.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_%28fallacy%29

It'll be easy for you to prove your claim because all my posts are still available, just click on the 'history' link under the avatar. So all you need to do now to show I've 'cherry picked' and altered the meaning of a quote is repost something I've quoted - with the alleged 'missing parts' that change or distort the meaning highlighted.Off you go, there's a lot at stake... well, there's only a lot at stake I guess if you want to think of yourself as an honest, principled, or ethical person, and you of course, may not.We'll soon see.

It's a big part of it. Archeologists and anthropologists (and others) date the beginnings of religion to the earliest evidence of burial rituals. Rituals (obviously) can be of no assistance to the dead person, they function to assist the living deal with what is happening. Self-aware homo sapiens feared the mystery and finality of death. Ceremony, gifts, favourite items, tools to help them in their 'journey'... Religions still focus pretty heavily on 'what happens after you die'. They pretend to 'know' the answers, or at least have a connection to a god thing that knows the answers, and they sell the belief with promises of a big pay-off later. It's directly aimed at, and intended to assuage, fear of the unknown. The holy books reek of it - death as purification. Ultimate and permanent salvation (for the 'chosen' ones) and descriptions of life that make it sound like only the pre-cursor to the best part. Life is apparently a brief interlude where you have an opportunity to prepare yourself for the main show, which lasts forever and ever... where it's all happy. And grandad isn't dead anymore. So don't be afraid.

The bible isn't a documentary, folks.

...you don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater... Or you can throw out the baby too and nobody will really care, but then the baby will never grow up and show you something you've never seen before.

What do you think 'the bible' can show that no one has ever seen before?

Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as:A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

Calguy,Don’t even bother reading anyone who quotes Columbia University Professors. They don’t know what they’re talking about. That University is a cesspool of militant, unconscionable leftists...

Classic.

Anti-intellectualism is an important characteristic of Fascist ideology.

Meanwhile, back in reality...

Columbia University is one of the world's most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields.This institute is rated 5 Stars based on 5 categories.ResearchFacilitiesInternationalizationInnovationSpecialist Criteriahttp://www.topuniversities.com/universities/columbia-university/undergrad

Columbia UniversityWORLD RANK 2013-1413Overall score 85.2New York, United StatesColumbia awards the annual literary Pulitzer Prize and boasts more Nobel prizewinners than any other institution in the world. It has three undergraduate schools, 13 graduate and professional schools and one of continuing education.http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/institution/columbia-university

The point of posting those ^^^ references is not 'prove' that Columbia is a wonderful institution, but merely to show your method - Step1. Arbitrarily dismiss (and try to discredit) reality.Step2. Insert Propaganda.

Because the claims you are making are the same claims other religions make, with the same reasoning, and the same conviction.They all pretend, just like you, to 'know' things they can't possibly know.

We do not pretend....It is a fact,God answers to our prayers, that's why we know

It isn't 'a fact'. It's your belief. If it was 'a fact' you'd be able to produce supporting evidence. Which rather conspicuously, you don't - because you can't.

They, just like you, simply believe the story they are telling. That's all.

Not, that's not all, We FEEL HIM close to us all the time.!!

You believe you "FEEL HIM". That's all. Some people 'FEEL' radio's and TV's send them secret messages.

But their belief, just like yours, is not any kind of support for the idea that what they are saying is true.

Well, we all know ...... It is true that HE is the truth.

You pretend to 'know'. Just like all the other religions pretend they 'know' their god thing/s are 'true' and yours isn't.

They may in fact, just like you, be telling lies.

No, no lies about God, no lies are allowed in the Bible, That is our Sacred Book, we all go by those laws.

The bible could accurately be described as 'A Book Of Lies'. It's a twisted variant of earlier myths - rewritten with a different tribe in the starring role, that's been re-interpreted almost to death as various parts of it have been conclusively shown to conflict with known, and obvious, reality.

Because they are, just like you, only pretending to know things they don't, and can't, actually know.

Again,We are not pretending, In fact, we feel that God is close to us,In fact, we feel that He is taking care of us.

Adherents of all religions die in the exact proportions one would expect given their representation in the community - in natural disasters, of illness and disease, in accidents.Your favourite god thing is clearly asleep on the job.

ewwwww! Some of the recent posts read like extracts from a Fascist Manifesto.

Fascism [is] the precise negation of that doctrine which formed the basis of the so-called Scientific or Marxian Socialism. (p. 30)

After Socialism, Fascism attacks the whole complex of democratic ideologies and rejects them both in their theoretical premises and in their applications or practical manifestations. Fascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a majority, can rule human societies; it denies that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation; it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men, who cannot be levelled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as universal suffrage. (p. 31)

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere. (p. 32)

"Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism – born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it."

Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism